A lone wolf, formerly in cahoots with Melbourne's riff-raff, who love to do all of the above, duh.

Tag Archives: botany zines

This week I’m doing it! I’m cracking open a tinnie and reading a zine, and both choices will reflect the struggle that is millennial life! Why am I joking and exclaiming so much when I had such a shitty last few days!

A post shared by some beer hack (@eatdrinkstagger) on Mar 13, 2018 at 2:50am PDT

zine: what is a fruit? what is a vegetable? by Sandy, NSW

drink: Old Wives’ Ales Old Man Yells At Cloud NE IPA

I started drinking before reading, because I just got home from one of the places I source my booze, and been dying to try this NE IPA for ages – pop cult ref, tick. Juicy and hazy, tick. Smells divine, tick. Fresh! tick.

My cat’s wandered off as she tends to do whenever I spend too much time faffing about with books or on my laptop, but she also does this thing where if I’m a tad down, she’ll just stay close and occasionally meow at me to make sure I’m paying attention to life or something, or will get the odd demonic-type possession-craving for raw meat, so she doesn’t have to contemplate bloody fruit-veg epistemology!

Most of us end up learning that tomatoes are fruits (belonging to the deadly nightshade family)*, and that rhubarb is a vegetable, and that science is a very convenient knowledge bank to swim in when one needs to argue which is which. Fair point! But, as Mulder once made famous, a lot of us want to believe certain things, even though we most likely know it’s unlikely to be true. I’d die of shock if Nessie actually existed because…that’s some cool shit. I guess the Southern Hemisphere equivalent for me would be finding new thylacines, even though their jaws terrify the shit out of me.

Okay, the beer is still fucking delicious, and apparently the botanist def of fruit is ‘ripened ovaries along with their contents and adhering accessory structures.’ Like whoa, too much learning for an early-in-the-weeknight. Classifications are useful, but we know so little about our world, and my guess is that nature does ‘break’ rules we dim humans use because we can’t cope with anything outside the box. Come to think of it, this zine doesn’t really talk much about vegetables – only eggplant/aubergine (also a deadly nightshade? when not masquerading as its emoticon shorthand for large male appendages? size doesn’t matter, fools, it’s what you do with what you’re given! um, anyway…)

A lot of these zine reviews have really taken on a metanarrative quality supposedly picked up from the zine being reviewed, but to be honest, I’m enjoying my beer too much to really care about why vegetables are hardly mentioned in this ranty zine. Does it matter that I’m drinking it from a tumbler? Can I blame Bar SK for this (bad) habit? Will my Ralph-picspamming mate in Sydney forgive me for not buying him a can? (hey Trev, it’s best fresh and I don’t know if it’d be any good by July…).

It’s Tuesday evening…I’m feeling hopeful about the week even though I’m about to get metaphorically snowed under with a fuckton of reading. Good thing I like reading…

*I unintentionally made this sound like a cult thanks to blog tagging, but…yeah, it sounds like a cult, lulz!